History

The location of the Guggenheim Museum®on Fifth Avenue between 88th and 89th Streets is not accidental. Its proximity to Central Park was key; as close to nature as one can get in New York, the park affords relief from the noise and congestion of the city.

Nature not only provided the museum with a respite from New York's distractions but also leant it inspiration. The Guggenheim Museum® is an embodiment of Frank Lloyd Wright's attempts to utilize organic forms in architecture.

But even as it embraced nature, Wright's design also expresses his unique take on modernist architecture's rigid geometry. The building is a symphony of triangles, ovals, arcs, circles, and squares.

Wright dispensed with the conventional approach to museum design, which led visitors through a series of interconnected rooms. Instead, he whisked people to the top of the building via elevator, and led them downward at a leisurely pace on the gentle slope of a continuous ramp. The open rotunda afforded viewers the unique possibility of seeing several bays of work on different levels simultaneously.

The building itself has often been called the most important piece of art in the Guggenheim collection.

Architect

In June 1943, Frank Lloyd Wright was asked by Hilla Rebay, the art advisor to Solomon R. Guggenheim, to design a new building to house Guggenheim's four-year-old Museum of Non-Objective Painting. Guggenheim wanted an architectural environment that would be as revolutionary as the paintings in his collection.

The project would evolve into a complex struggle pitting the architect against his clients, city officials, the art world, and public opinion. It would take over 15 years, 700 sketches and seven complete sets of working drawings before Wright’s vision would be realized and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum® would open it’s doors for the first time in 1959. By then both Guggenheim and Wright had died.

Arguably America’s greatest architect and among the world’s most gifted, Frank Lloyd Wright, was also a man of boundless energy. In a career that spanned over 74 years, he designed over 900 buildings, authored almost 20 books as well as hundreds of articles, letters and speeches.

He had a clear idea of how the Guggenheim Museum® should function: “It should be one extended well-proportioned floor space from bottom to top – going around and up and down, throughout. The eye should encounter no abrupt change but be gently led as if at the edge of the shore watching an un-breaking wave”.